The Extinction Files Box Set

by A. G. Riddle

  Desmond had barely slept. The anticipation of talking to the source—and the hope that he might finally learn what had happened to him—had consumed his thoughts.

  At first light, he took out his phone to do some research in preparation for the day. He wondered if whoever had sent Gunter Thorne to his hotel room would be prowling the streets, looking for him. He knew the Berlin police were. One or both groups might already know about his meeting with the mysterious man he had called—the person who had been corresponding with him via the Google Voice line. That meant that today would be a contest of cleverness—and, if they found him, physical might. Desmond wanted to be prepared. It took him hours to put the pieces in place, but by noon he was finished and on his way to the heart of Berlin, where his elaborate game would unfold.

  He wore dark sunglasses and a baseball cap pulled down nearly to his eyebrows. Among the tourists and locals, he blended in well. He walked along the tree-lined thoroughfare of Unter Den Linden, his pace casual, his gaze straight ahead. Behind the dark glasses his eyes scanned everyone who passed him, every vehicle.

  At the end of Unter Den Linden lay Pariser Platz, an open-air pedestrian square closed off to automobile traffic, and beyond that was the Tiergarten, a lush green park crisscrossed with walking trails. The US and French embassies lined the square, and the UK embassy was close by. If Desmond was cornered by the police or the group who had sent Gunter Thorne to his hotel room, he would retreat to one of the embassies—but only as a last resort.

  Desmond stood for a minute, looking across the square at Berlin’s most visited and recognizable monument, the pre-eminent symbol of German history: the Brandenburg Gate. His research last night had been fascinating. The gate had been constructed in the 1780s by Frederick William II, the king of Prussia, Germany’s predecessor state. Conceived as the entrance to Unter den Linden—which led at the time to the Prussian palace at the end of the street—the sandstone monument had been modeled after the Propylaea in Athens. It featured twelve carved columns—six on the front side, six on the rear—and was massive: 66 feet tall, 213 feet wide.

  During World War II, the buildings in Pariser Platz had been leveled, and the Brandenburg Gate was significantly damaged. It sat unrepaired until 1957, and even after its restoration it was rarely visited, as it was enclosed by the Berlin Wall, preventing residents of both the east and west from reaching it. Second only to the wall itself, the gate came to stand as a symbol of a divided country and capital.

  It was before this gate’s towering pillars that President Ronald Reagan stood in 1987 and said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” But it was the Germans themselves who tore it down—on November 9, 1989, after East Germany announced that its citizens could visit West Germany. And a month and a half after that, on December 22, 1989, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl walked through Brandenburg Gate to meet East German Prime Minister Hans Modrow, formalizing the unification of Germany after almost forty-five years of division.

  As Desmond watched the midday sun shine down on the monument, casting shadows on the crowds bustling through Pariser Platz, he hoped the gate’s history was a good omen—and that the day’s events would set him on his own course to freedom.

  A few hundred feet away, a man named Garin Meyer stepped out of a taxi and made his way to the center of Pariser Platz. He wore a navy peacoat, jeans, a ball cap, and aviator sunglasses. He took a spiral-bound notebook from his backpack, flipped it open, and held it to his chest, revealing a page with block letters:

  LOOKING GLASS TOURS

  He stood still for several minutes, then began looking around, growing increasingly nervous.

  In a white cargo van parked near Pariser Platz, two men wearing headphones hunched over a bank of computer screens, watching video feeds of the man holding the sign.

  “Units One and Two, subject looks antsy. Be prepared to pursue and capture if he takes flight.”

  Clicks echoed over the open comm line, acknowledging the directive.

  “Unit Three, confirm you’ve attached the tracking dot to the subject.”

  Another click echoed on the line.

  They would know exactly where Garin Meyer went, and if they were successful, he would soon lead them to Desmond Hughes.

  A runner in fluorescent spandex stopped in front of Garin, tied his shoe, then handed him a business card and darted off.

  Garin read the card, stuffed the notebook into his backpack, and jogged across the square. He ducked inside a canvas-covered rickshaw, which took off, racing along Pariser Platz and onto the pedestrian trails in the Tiergarten.

  “Subject is on the move,” Unit Two announced over the open comm line.

  A second later, he added, “He’s switched. Subject is now in a rickshaw with a blue top.”

  The men in the cargo van could hear the field agents panting as they ran.

  “I’ve lost him,” Unit Two said.

  “Units Three and Four, report.”

  “Unit Three. I’ve got him. He switched again outside the rose garden.”

  A long pause, then, “He’s pulling away.”

  “Unit Six,” a woman said. “I’ve got him. Passing the Bismarck Memorial.”

  She panted as her footfalls grew faster, then stopped. “Subject has exited the rickshaw. Be advised, a similarly dressed man has jumped into the rickshaw: peacoat and jeans. The shoes, sunglasses, and hat are different. Actual subject is moving on foot.”

  One of the men in the van spoke over the open line, “Confirmed, tracking dot is moving on foot.”

  The woman’s breathing slowed. “He’s entering the English Garden, moving toward the teahouse. Please advise.”

  “Observe and follow, Unit Six,” the agent in the van said. “Units Five and Seven, converge on the teahouse. Be advised meeting may be taking place there. Be on the lookout for Hughes and prepare to apprehend.”

  The teahouse inside the Teirgarten’s English Garden was packed with tourists. Garin squeezed past them and entered the men’s restroom. The last rickshaw driver had given him another card:

  In the restroom, seek the Looking Glass and await instructions.

  Garin wasn’t sure what it meant, but inside the bathroom, he found a paper sign taped to the second stall:

  Out of Order

  Looking Glass Sanitation

  He slowly pushed the door open.

  Outside the teahouse, Unit Six watched Garin Meyer exit and race to a cab. She moved quickly, speaking into her mic. “Subject has exited the building, entering a cab with plate number B WT 393.”

  The lead agent in the van said, “Tracking confirmed. Units Five and Seven, pursue. Air One, do you have eyes on the cab?”

  “Affirmative, Alpha Leader, target is painted. We’re following.”

  As the cab pulled away from the curb, Units Five and Seven put their motorcycles in gear and followed a few cars behind, careful not to attract attention. Twenty minutes later, the subject exited the cab and entered a small cafe on Reichsstraße, a few blocks from the Olympic stadium built for the 1936 games. He sat at a small table in the back and took out his cell phone.

  Outside, the two units on motorcycles waited, as did the helicopter unit. Thirty minutes later, one of the agents in the van said, “You think Hughes got spooked?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You want to make the call?”

  “No. Let’s wait a few more minutes.”

  They were both dreading the call—and the consequences. Conner McClain would not be happy.

  The subject rose and walked to the bathroom. When he didn’t emerge after five minutes, the lead agent said, “Units Five and Seven, take the subject into custody. Repeat, enter the cafe and take the subject into custody. Ground Two, bring the van around for extract.”

  The two agents entered the cafe, marched to the bathroom, and burst in, handguns drawn.

  The bathroom was empty.

  In the van off Pariser Platz, the two agents shared a nervous glance. The lead agent
took out his mobile phone and dialed.

  Off the Horn of Africa, on board the Kentaro Maru, Conner McClain answered with a single word. “Report.”

  “We lost him.”

  Conner sighed and leaned back from the long desk. He stared at the screen on the wall. It showed a map, with red spreading out from major cities across the world.

  “Listen to me very carefully,” he said. “Desmond Hughes is smarter than you are. He’s smarter than I am. He’s smarter than anyone I’ve ever met. Our only chance of catching him is to do something he’s not willing to do—something he would never consider. Now tell me how you’re going to find him. Quickly.”

  “Stand by.” The agent in the van muted his headset, presumably to converse with his colleague.

  He unmuted the line and said, “Okay, we could review cam footage from our field units of the cafe off Reichsstraße and the teahouse, look for any individuals in disguise—”

  “Hughes would have thought of that. Remember, he’s smarter than you are. Think outside the box. What’s the one thing you have?”

  The team leader muted his mic again. A minute later, he reactivated it and said, “Sorry, we’ve got nothing here.”

  “You know the identity of someone meeting with Hughes as we speak.”

  “We use our contacts to trace Meyer’s mobile—”

  “Hughes would have thought of that too: Meyer won’t have his phone with him. Think about what you know.”

  “Uhmm…”

  “You know that Meyer is scared. He will have another phone, probably a disposable, and he will have given someone he loves and trusts the number—just in case. You find that person, you get to Garin Meyer. You get to him fast enough, you get Desmond Hughes—and we all live through this. I suggest you hurry, for all of our sakes.”

  In the teahouse bathroom, Garin Meyer had expected to see Desmond Hughes waiting in the stall, but it was empty.

  Garin entered, latched the door, and waited.

  Someone in the next stall slipped a package wrapped in brown paper under the divider. A note on top read:

  Put these on. Pass your clothes under. Wait twenty minutes. Then exit the teahouse and get in the taxi with license plate B FK 281.

  In the package, Garin found a change of clothes, including shoes. He changed quickly in the cramped stall and shoved his own clothes under the partition.

  A moment later, he heard the door to the next stall open. Voices whispered, though he couldn’t make out the words, and the door to the bathroom swung open.

  Twenty minutes later, he rose, exited the teahouse, and got in the taxi. The driver pulled away without asking for a destination.

  At Cafe Einstein in Unter Den Linden, a few blocks from Pariser Platz and the Brandenburg Gate, Desmond Hughes sat at an outside table, flipping through a print copy of Die Welt. He still wore the dark sunglasses and the ball cap pulled down to his eyebrows, blending in with the throngs of tourists bustling past. His calm demeanor hid the anticipation swelling inside him.

  As he flipped the pages, a picture caught his eye: a photo of sick Africans stretched out on mats in a large room. Personnel in Tyvek containment suits leaned over them. The headline read:

  Ebola Again?

  He scanned the article. It featured several quotes from a Jonas Becker, a German physician working for the World Health Organization, who had recently been dispatched to Kenya to respond to what looked like an Ebola outbreak. But the name that jumped out at Desmond wasn’t Becker’s—it was Dr. Peyton Shaw. Becker was joining forces with Shaw, whom he had worked with during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. It quoted him as saying, “Peyton Shaw is the best disease detective in the world. I’m honored to be working with her and the Kenyan Ministry of Health to stop this outbreak. I’m confident we’ll be successful—just as we were in West Africa a few years ago.”

  Peyton Shaw—she’s the key to all of this, Desmond thought.

  But how? The message in his hotel room had said, Warn Her. Was the outbreak what he was supposed to warn her about? The memory he’d recalled yesterday morning replayed in his mind: the scene where he had walked through a warehouse filled with plastic-wrapped isolation rooms. It was all connected; he was sure of it. The pieces all fit together in some way.

  At that moment, a man wearing a knit cap and large sunglasses stopped before Desmond, towering over him.

  “That was very clever, Desmond.”

  Chapter 16

  Berlin’s Unter Den Linden boulevard was crammed with passersby. They weaved around the tables outside Cafe Einstein as they rushed to the Brandenburg Gate and the attractions in Pariser Platz, taking little note of Desmond and the man standing before him.

  The visitor sat, though he kept his hands out of sight, one under the table, the other in his jacket pocket.

  “Did you kill him?” he asked.

  Desmond slowly lowered the paper copy of Die Welt to the table and leaned back. “What did I tell you on the phone?”

  “I asked you a question.”

  “I have a gun pointed at you under this table,” Desmond said. “If you’re not the man I spoke with on the phone, I will shoot you, then I will figure out who sent you, and I will find them and get my answers from them.”

  The man grew very still. “You said to wear a navy peacoat, jeans, sunglasses, and a hat. To hold up a sign that said ‘Looking Glass Tours’ in Pariser Platz.”

  “Where are the clothes?”

  The man swallowed, still visibly nervous. “I slipped them under a bathroom stall in the teahouse.”

  “What’s your name?”

  Confusion crossed the man’s face.

  “Humor me,” Desmond said.

  “Garin Meyer.”

  The night before, and all that morning, Desmond had considered very carefully what he would say to this man. And he had decided to lay it all on the line. He needed answers, and he sensed that time was running out.

  “Garin, yesterday morning, when I woke up in the Concord Hotel, that man was dead in my living room. I had a big bruise on my ribs and a knot on my head, and I don’t remember anything prior to that—who I am, what happened to me, or how he died.”

  Garin shook his head, clearly skeptical. “You’re lying.”

  “I’m not. I found a note in my pocket. It led me to your phone number.”

  Garin squinted and glanced away from Desmond, as if contemplating whether he believed him.

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Answers. I’m trying to figure out what happened to me.”

  Garin looked incredulous. “You want answers from me?”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Because you owe me some answers.” Garin glanced around. “Forget it. I’m done.”

  He began to stand, but Desmond leaned forward and grabbed his forearm. “You said someone was following you. What if it’s the same person who killed Gunter Thorne?”

  That got Garin’s attention.

  “You really want to walk away without hearing what I have to say?”

  Garin exhaled and settled back into the chair.

  “Okay. Good. Let’s start over. How do we know each other? What do you do?”

  “I’m an investigative journalist writing for Der Spiegel. You contacted me a few weeks ago.”

  “Why?”

  “To discuss a story I’d written. It was about multi-national corporations that were possibly colluding with each other on everything from bid-fixing to currency manipulation and unauthorized clinical trials. You said I’d stumbled upon something much bigger, that I’d only seen the tip of the iceberg. You wanted to meet. You promised me the biggest story of my career, ‘possibly the biggest story of all time.’”

  “A story about what?”

  “The Looking Glass.”

  The three words struck fear into Desmond. But try as he might, he couldn’t remember why.

  “What is the Looking Glass?” he asked.

  “According to you,
it’s a project that has been going on for over two thousand years. A scientific endeavor on a scale the world has never seen before. You said the greatest scientific minds in history, across generations, had been working on the Looking Glass, and that it was near completion. Your words to me were that it would make the Manhattan Project and the creation of the nuclear bomb look like a middle school science fair exhibit.”

  “The Looking Glass is a weapon?”

  “I don’t know; you never told me. We were supposed to meet four days ago. You were going to tell me everything then, and I was going to write up the story and publish it online. You said it was the only way to stop what was going to happen. You said they had penetrated all levels of governments around the world, and that exposing them was the only way to stop them.”

  “Stop whom?”

  “Again, I don’t know.”

  “And you have no idea what the Looking Glass is, or does?”

  “I wish I did. You wouldn’t tell me over the phone, only that very soon the scientists building it would use it to take control of the human race, and that it would permanently alter humanity’s future.”

  Desmond couldn’t hide his disappointment. He had woken up this morning expecting to get answers. And so, it seemed, had Garin Meyer. The man had as many questions as Desmond did.

  “Can you tell me anything else? Anything I said, even if you think it might be irrelevant.”

  “Just one other thing. You said there were three components of the Looking Glass: Rook, Rendition, and Rapture.”

  Rapture Therapeutics, Desmond thought. The dead man in his hotel room had been a security worker there. As for Rook and Rendition… he was sure he had seen those words somewhere too, but he couldn’t place them.

  Garin reached into his pocket and drew out a flip phone.

  “I said no phones.”